What does this picture show you ask? Well, her face, sorta. you can see the bones in her arm at the front, and you can sorta see an eye. This is a profile shot. Just not a very good one. According to the sonographer, if she would move, we would most likely get beautiful pictures because there's plenty of amniotic fluid. But our little bundle of joy is already camera shy.
Now to the not so exciting part. Well, I guess it's exciting in the terrifying kind of way. Baby G was 16 days behind in growth today, which means she gained a day. But she dropped to the 7th percentile in size. Below is the summary page showing the graph and her EFW (estimated fetal weight).
They get the estimated fetal weight by taking a bunch of measurements of different markers, like head circumference, femur length, etc. The graph is shown in grams; so you have to do the conversion to lbs (1kg=2.2lbs). Right now, she weighs about 4 pounds, 1 ounce. Because she's been sticking pretty close to the lower 10% graph line, you can sorta guesstimate how much she'll weigh at different points by following that line. So if she were born at 40 weeks, she'd be a little over 6 pounds.
Before I said that they start to worry when the percentile drops below 10%, which today it did. And they were more worried. At this point, their concern really seems to be that maybe the baby isn't getting enough nutrients from my body. The doppler measuring the blood through the umbilical cord looked good, and there's plenty of amniotic fluid surrounding the baby. She's also moving around the way she should, and her anatomy looks good. But they're concerned anyway. Of course, she could also just be small. Or there could be something wrong with her that the amnio wouldn't have detected. Or she could just be dated wrong.
I think if she would have stayed above the 10th percentile that they would have changed my due date. That doesn't look likely now. Instead, they might induce me to deliver even earlier. Which is way scary.
From what I understand, the reason they would induce me early (or at all) would be due to the nutrition concern. In other words, at some point it becomes better to get her out of there early rather than leave her in if there if she isn't getting enough of what she needs from my body. Because they can't be certain of whether or not there is a nutritional deficiency, they might decide it's safer to proceed as if there is.
This of course does not make me happy, because if it's a dating issue, and she's 2 weeks younger than they think, then they're pulling her out even earlier than they think. I'd rather give her as much time as she needs to develop. Pulling her out early seems scary.
And also, getting induced sucks. It makes labor and delivery harder in a lot of instances. You can only force so much. If your body isn't ready, it's just not ready. So if I were to be induced, I'd be a lot more likely to need other medical interventions to get her out. Which sucks for both of us.
They do at least want to give her time to hit what would be considered full-term even if there is a dating issue. Full-term is 36 weeks. So it's relatively safe to assume that they won't induce until at least 38 weeks, and the doctor's notes say that he wouldn't want to deliver at less than 39 weeks, unless something changes.
(Below are the doctor's comments.)
So I now have even more doctor's appts. The bliss of only going every 4 weeks for ultrasounds is gone. I now have one next week. This one will just measure the Doppler and make sure she's moving around enough and all that. They have to wait longer in between ultrasounds to measure growth...so the ultrasound for that is 3 weeks from today.
I found some of the individual measurements to be scary today as well. Last time around I looked at how many days a bunch of the measurements were off, and assumed that her head was keeping up better than her body because her head was less days behind. Either I misread, or there's less variations in head size, because her head circumference was less than the 3rd percentile today. Kinda scary to me.
On the up-side, the sonographer we saw today is the one I really like. She's very comforting. She wasn't supposed to show us this...but she did anyway. If you do adjust our due date by the 16 days we're behind by, then Baby G is growing just fine. She would be measuring in the 35th percentile then, which is still a little less than average, but way better than 7th. You can kinda figure all this out though by looking at the graph and seeing where we'd fall if our date is wrong.
OK. I think that's probably about all the news from today.
No comments:
Post a Comment